As always, I listened to Terry Pluto’s weekly podcast this morning (I got to it a day late because my schedule dictated that I go to the gym before it was up on cleveland.com on Tuesday).
Despite my belief that the Plain Dealer will never link to our site until I stop discrediting his assertions, I’ve decided to continue going against him, if only because too many people in Cleveland who read his columns take them as the word of God, and I would like to help them see the light.
But I’m only going to do it every other week because I’m a Christian.
Surprisingly, Pluto made some good points about the NBA, defending the Varejao signing using okay logic and mentioning the effect losing Hedo’s height may have on the Magic running the pick and roll or getting the ball in to Da-wight in the post.
When it got to the Indians, however, where I normally find Pluto sufficient, he brought up a couple more than questionable points.
The first had to do with whether or not the Indians rely on statistical analsyis too much when making their player evaluations. Dan Labbe, who asks the questions for all of the Plain Dealer podcasts, referred to it as “that new wave…of the Moneyball approach, using statistics to really evaluate guys”…
I would now like to take up a collection so we can buy a copy of Moneyball for the Plain Dealer staff.
Moneyball was published in 2003 and written prior to that - Theo Epstein was using stats when he was an assistant GM for the Red Sox while Billy Beane was fleecing Mark Shapiro for Ricardo Rincon - this can no longer be described as a “new wave” approach.
That’s first. Then there’s the case of David Dellucci, who Labbe mentioned as supporting evidence of the Indians bad decision making process - which Pluto then agreed with.
Dellucci, my dad’s least favorite baseball player - possibly ever - is an interesting situation because his OPS in the three years before he got to Cleveland was above average and trending upward (.783, .879, and .899). The first two years he played for the Rangers, and the third year he was a member of the Phillies. I’m not finding specifics in terms of adjusting OPS for ballpark, but the fact that he was successful in both Texas and Philadelphia, as well as both the AL and the AL, would seem to be meaningful. Further, his highest home run total - a huge factor in OPS - was in his second year with Texas (29)…so he overcame a much lower HR total in Philly (13) to still have a strong OPS.
Of course, when Dellucci arrived in Cleveland he devolved - .679, .711 and .546 - all of which are below his career average.
Was this Mark Shapiro’s fault?
It’s pretty hard to argue that it was, especially since the first season Dellucci only played in 56 games because of injuries, and the last number - this season’s - includes only 20 games after which Dellucci was cut.
People are working on stats that predict players’ injury tendencies based on past history (you can read the New York Times article here if you’re interested), but until then it’s difficult to chalk Dellucci’s below average performance up to anything other than bad luck - not to Shapiro’s proclivity to use stats to evaluate talent.
Remember, Dellucci didn’t prevent the Indians from winning because Shapiro valued the wrong statistic - Dellucci merely underperformed. And Epstein - a stats fiend - has won two World Series with the Red Sox circling the same statistical wagon.
There’s evidence to suggest then that the method Shapiro uses isn’t the problem - rather, the issue may just be with how the person using the method applies it. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about the discrepancies between the approaches of the Red Sox and the Indians to parse out where Shapiro might be going wrong, but the team’s overall record since 2001 when he took over (661-635) is not the big suggestion he’s misstepping somewhere, it’s how the team has collapsed since being one win away from the World Series.*
The only thing I can guess is that the Indians may be placing too much emphasis on short term success and small sample sizes. But that’s just a shot in the dark.
After briefly chatting about Dellucci, Pluto goes on to declare pitching statistics harder to analyze than hitting stats. He states that the Indians place a lot of emphasis on strikeouts per 9 innings because it shows “velocity” and “sharpness,” and you can assume that will decrease as a pitcher gets older, so you want to make sure you get a young pitcher who’s good with both since he’ll gradually get worse.
Okay…
I don’t doubt the Indians use strikeouts per 9 innings as a key measure of a pitcher’s value - but it has nothing to do with esoteric qualities like velocity and sharpness. Again, if anyone employed by the Plain Dealer had read Moneyball they would understand that major studies have been done that essentially show that once the bat hits the ball what happens after that has nothing to do with the pitcher - it’s all luck based on how the ball travels, where it lands, how the defense is positioned, and who those fielders are.
I know this sounds ludicrous, but go get Moneyball and read Chapter 10 - “Anatomy of an Undervalued Pitcher” and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The thesis is that pitchers should be valued based on what they can control - and that is home runs, walks, hit batters, and strikeouts.
(You may remember that I centered an entire argument about closers around numbers other than these, but that’s okay - I hadn’t read Chapter 10 yet - and I can use it for another column that’ll be coming in the near future).
Finally, the Indians portion of the podcast concluded, more or less, with Pluto offering his opinion on whether or not the Indians should trade Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez before the deadline.
He believes the team should consider trading Victor - but not Cliff - based mainly around the idea that the Indians starting pitching is so bereft that the team couldn’t survive losing Lee next season. They do, however, have some catching prospects that could potentially make up for Victor’s loss (Carlos Santana is one of these guys).
I don’t adamantly disagree with Pluto’s points, although the team isn’t winning when Lee pitches now anyway and even if they were to win every 5th day next year that certainly isn’t going to make them more than a .500 team - we saw evidence of that in the ‘08 season when Lee won the Cy Young.
I’d prefer the Indians keep Victor and move him to first base, get rid of Shoppach or make him a back up, call up Santana, and commit to LaPorta being the every day left fielder. That’s the best course of action in my opinion - but we’ve seen this year how Eric Wedge is with putting players in one position and keeping them there….
To me, the Indians decision about Lee all depends on what happens with Toronto and Roy Halladay. I believe you can get more for a pitcher when they’re not in a contract year, and the threat of losing them to free agency isn’t two months away, it’s a season and a half - which is where both Toronto and Cleveland are right now with Halladay and Lee respectively. But Halladay openly being on the market decreases Lee’s value by increasing supply…until, perhaps, Halladay is traded - and then the teams that lost out on him could scramble and do something drastic to get Lee in a frantic attempt to play catch up.
That, in my opinion, is the moment Shapiro should be waiting for and then analyzing when it arrives.
The problem the organization faces right now for the second half of the season is that incentives are divided. Both Shapiro and Wedge want to keep their jobs, but each has to approach doing so in a different way - Shapiro building for the future, and Wedge demonstrating that he can get a group of guys to win now, finishing the season with as strong a record as possible.
Wedge doesn’t want to call up the youngsters and evaluate their talent - he wants to play the guys who give him the best chance to win today. That’s a much different point of view than Shapiro, who wants to prove to the Dolans that the guys he’s been stuffing into the minors are actual players that can help the organization climb out of this mess.
This is why it was a mistake not to fire Wedge. I believe Shapiro needs to go as well - it’s more his fault than Wedge’s at this point, given the little value I place on what a manager actually does to make his players perform - but missing in all of the negative talk about interim managers and how they can ruin season is this specific conversation. We saw it with the Browns last year, and we’re going to see it with the Indians in the second half. The benefit of an interim manager is that he doesn’t care about losing now for the sake of the future because he’s not going to have a job anyway.
The threat with keeping Wedge around is that the second half of the season is ruined just as badly as the past season and a half have been.
*The Oakland A’s haven’t exactly been lighting up the baseball world either and, as Billy Beane was the center piece of Moneyball, it’d be interesting to see how the game has transformed since the book was published in 2003 and why the A’s success has floundered. I suspect it’s because other teams caught on and players are now valued more correctly - but steroids could also play a part. Michael Lewis really should write a sequel.
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